If you’ve been following my website, you would’ve seen my latest article about when the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit would fully end. I talked about the history of the lawsuit and who brought it up during the last part of their time at the SEC as well as how the SEC went out against other multiple crypto firms as well. I also talked about how Ripple received a partial victory in that lawsuit, but one of the last final acts of Gary Gensler was to appeal that ruling in the court of appeals.
Well folks there is some major Ripple lawsuit news right now that came out on Wednesday. The CEO of Ripple released a video saying that the appeal of the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit is officially over. This is absolutely massive and the moment many in the XRP community has been waiting for. Did the price of XRP jump because of that? I will take a closer look at that as well as some lingering questions of things that happened during the last four years of this lawsuit.
XRP Price after Official Lawsuit End
With the announcement of the end of the SEC lawsuit, XRP definitely had a pop in price. Here’s the thing though. While it did have a short, but rapid increase, some people said it didn’t go as high as it should have following the announcement of the end of the lawsuit. The price of XRP jumped from around $2.25 to around $2.60. Some people were disappointed it didn’t reach $3.00.
Here’s the thing. While it is very important that the SEC lawsuit is at an end, it is not the sole reason behind what’s deemed as XRP’s price suppression, but it has been one of the largest obstacles preventing Ripple from achieving its main business objectives. Now that it is out of the way, Ripple can go full fledged of what they aim to do in the financial world which is to become the best and fastest cross border payment system in the world as well as having their XRPL Ledger being the main netowrk for real word asset tokenization.
In order for XRP to have a great run in price increases, it will have to move into the utility phase since the retail sector is a bit apprehensive right now going full in on crypto. Imagine though if the SEC lawsuit never happened how much closer we would’ve already been to the utility phase if not already being in it. Once you have massive institutional investment pouring in because of what Ripple’s XRPL Ledger can do along with XRP itself being that bridge token, XRP price will definitely increase because of massive amounts of liquidity. With the SEC lawsuit and appeal now over, are there any lingering questions or other things to think about?
The Fine Against Ripple
As I mentioned in the previous article, Ripple did receive a partial victory in that lawsuit in which it was determined that the sale of XRP on secondary markets such as cryptocurrency exchanges do not constitute a violation of securities laws or is a security itself. That was a huge victory and one of the very rare times the SEC had a ruling against them.
With that being said though, the judge did rule that Ripple violated securities laws with its direct sales of XRP to institutions and has been ordered not to do any of those kinds of sales to institutions in the future. The judge also said that Ripple needs to pay a fine for violating those laws. The SEC wanted Ripple to pay a $2 billion dollar fine, but the CEO of Ripple and thankfully the judge said that’s very unrealistic and did not go for that. The judge then decided that a fine of $125 million was sufficient.
Ripple was prepared to pay that, but of course we know that the SEC decided to file an appeal against the judge’s ruling of the sales of XRP not being in violation of securities laws on secondary markets, thus delaying the payment of that fine. Since things have changed quite rapidly though within the SEC and it has ended its war against crypto, that has put this particular ruling against Ripple into doubt.
This has made many people wonder if Ripple is now going to pay the fine now that the lawsuit is over with or does Ripple intend to fight that and issue an appeal of its own against the ruling since the SEC has suddenly changed its stance against XRP and other cryptos? This is something that definitely bears watching as it is being highly speculated that Ripple will more than likely launch an appeal against this fine as well as the institutional sales of XRP being banned. I know if I were the CEO of Ripple, I certainly would fight against it now that the SEC is saying that XRP is not a security.
What Happens Next?
Even though the SEC technically didn’t officially say yet on their end that they are dropping their appeal against Ripple, the CEO of Ripple has no reason to lie and I think the SEC is just waiting for final confirmation in their process to announce it on their end. So what happens next after this?
I think Ripple is going to go all out and push forward with their business plan and get their infrastructure expanded/fully in place so that they can get cross border payments going on their ledger as well as real world asset tokenization. Those are definitely going to be their main focus and Brad Garlinghouse has even said that they are not focusing on going public/doing an IPO and instead focusing on acquisitions to help with their main business focus.
What about the price of XRP? Why isn’t it popping hard? While there was a little bit of a pop, the prices have come back down to about where they were before. This does have some understandably upset as the SEC case was quite possibly the biggest roadblock for Ripple to do what they want for XRP. The problem is, there are many other factors hampering the crypto markets right now. For one, lots of retail investors have left and are continuing to leave the scene.
The big reason why is because there is a lot of fear and uncertainty where the US and the rest of the world are headed economically. The US President’s tariffs are creating lots of economic fear as it threatens to raise prices on many goods within the US. There’s even worry that the US is headed for an economic recession. Investors don’t like this type of fear and uncertainity and so they go running to more traditional assets such as gold which is the highest it’s ever been in its history.
While there has been some of the most robust and best news for the crypto industry in its history, a lot of people just don’t feel optimistic with crypto right now and so, as a whole, it feels like the crypto world is being surpressed with mysterious big players called “whales” buying and selling very large amounts of crypto and XRP is no exception to that. So then the question becomes, what is going to cause the XRP price to really move forward? It’s going to be implementation of the utility phase and the way to really get that going is full scale cryptocurrency regulation that will make the crypto world flourish rather than hinder it. The SEC is supposed to have a live round table discussion on what kinds of regulation is needed to move the crypto industry forward and so that definitely is something that needs to be paid attention to. While the news of the SEC appeal against Ripple being dropped is wonderful news, we’re going to have to wait a bit longer before XRP and the crypto markets as whole really start to rebound.